After my recent article on Silent Hunter 5 and Ubisoft’s fascist, broken DRM system, a large number of comments kept me unsure just what to do with regard to buying the game or not. Sure, I wanted to check it out – see how it panned out as a game, and see just how it compared to earlier Silent Hunter titles, but I also began to slide into the category that seemingly almost all the commenters is in. I just didn’t want to throw down cash for a title that I wouldn’t even properly be able to enjoy with Australia’s net connectivity being what it sometimes is.

In the end, the question became moot, as I was given a copy to review for GameArena. It went up the other day – you can give it a read here. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s the gist – my last paragraph:

In all, the game seems to alternate between a wonderful, engrossing experience and a frustrating, incomplete one – and while we can hope that upcoming patches fix many of these (often niggling, sometimes major) problems, for the moment, Silent Hunter 5 remains a interesting but partially-broken game.

But reviewing Silent Hunter 5 presented me with a series of problems. Do I bring up the DRM? Is it reasonable to? What about the general state of the game? If a game is already being patched to remove some of the problems found in it at launch, should this factor in to a review?

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